Samenda and Carter

1:

I trusted him enough to tell him that I did not trust him. He was a handsome grim reaper wedged snuggly into the corner of my back porch, his long coyote limbs outstretched and nervous as he traced the fabric of my green oval chair. Love stood between us like a dying child, too ill to bear the sight of our callow passion. It existed amongst us like a delicate fragment of truth, such that we knew not to swing its blade too heavily. This anxious angel was visibly torn, kept from his natural grace by what he assumed to be a ball and chain damning him to some deserved torment. I wanted to give him the softness he so desperately needed, but it was too quick. 

Our circumstance was too glazed with fog, and the truth at hand, which shimmered so promisingly through that mist, was more dire than the fate of either of us youths, so young in our forms but seemingly primeval through our intentions. His gaze stuck through me like the very truth itself, as if it were bent on a revenge conceived in eons past. His frost eyes were impossibly sharp, but as I expressed my feelings to him they turned away from me. For just a moment, I felt as if the fight had gone. That he had released his blade and forfeited our lust. Not until his eyes, now softened, turned towards me again in distress. The very essence of a beating heart clung to his visible autumn breath, as his trembling voice offered to me a kind of wounded gospel.  

“I understand…and look...this is what torments me the most, between my parents, friends, everybody. I just...I want to be close so badly and feel love, but I just can’t make amends with even a shred of distance. Like I can become generally close to people and then I just destroy it because I’m so afraid of the uncertainty. Honestly the closer I become with someone, the more it feels like there's this hideous lie. Like we're both ignoring something terrible. Eventually that contrast becomes too great and I just feel like something has… well...died, and I just freak out. Like it feels as if somebody has legitimately died. Thats the level of intensity it reaches for me.“

I understood what he meant completely. He tried to apologize for bringing this malice to me, for being so crude at times and perhaps dishonest, but I stopped him midway through. 

“Whatever has died within you, I can give you back.”

I put my hand on his knee. At first he sighed and then smiled at me with now melted eyes. I admired him so much, for we truly felt the same thing, only he had the will to meet those feelings in battle. The distrust we had for each other was kept alive only by the mere paradox of it. In reality, there was nothing truly keeping us apart but ourselves. I felt the knife of our perceptions lower, to a point where even the contents of character moments ago were unneeded, as were any details of the future. The present moment however blossomed like a lotus flower, and revealed to us amidst its pedals the sacred truth, once a hidden blade now a beacon to our rallying splendor. I brushed my hand along his shaven jaw, the remnants of his whiskers subtle like the first spawns of grass in an abandoned house. We shared our second kiss and then he began to read me poems from his little black book.  

“Why do I die when you’re around me?

Because my senses think that heaven must have found me.

Though a foolish thought,  it still rings true.

That deaths a price too small for you.”   

At last I had known it to be fact, that love could be made flesh and that fear was synonymous with lies. I really felt that he could be the one, that we could be one, that together we could finally halt the chaos of life and be at peace. It was as if the love I had given him, it was as if I could feel it too, and at that point I just wanted to give him the world.  

2:

Perhaps Samenda was as right as she could have been in that moment, for the certainty of love is impossible to deny point blank, and even eons after. Unfortunately for her however, this certainty she now possessed would soon surpass both her and Carter, and expose her anxious angel to the painful truth of love. In some sense, Semenda would in fact give Carter the world, but not as she meant it. As the dark of night shifted over them, a galactic force prowled closer at a pace silent to their carnal senses. While the arbitrary particles of life dazzled their vision, sprinkling them with the chatter of crowds and the dance of traffic, behind the modern mechanism crawled the promises of one's deepest desires, which slunk past even their own intentions, and into the hands of a sentient umbra. 

Days passed between them, but only a few. Samenda cradled her certainty inside a definite intellect, loosely comprised of a bookish childhood and a soon to be set of degrees in biology and philosophy. Carter on the other hand existed within a more open sensibility, as he majored in design. They met at an off campus party, through what seemed to be a chance set of occurrences. As the two energies collided over the following week, the duality about them began to swirl around a peculiar centerpiece. In time, this movement would come to unscrew said nucleus like a cork from a wine bottle, the contents inside neither of them would come to expect.

In just three days after their embrace on the porch, Samendas heart had achieved supernova status. She could not stop thinking about him, for it seemed everything that could be in life, was in some way just a delineation of their passion. Her love for Carter blossomed in her eyes like an exploding star, blessing her with a sight unparalleled by any other emotional tangent. The world to her played out in brilliant display, with a severity of color such that it escapes the realms of apt description. By that same notion however, the vibrancy she was experiencing soon began to supersede even itself, and flickered into a land of the black, white and gray. On her journey home from classes one afternoon, that same supernova would come to develop into a viscous black hole.

Although the birds seemed to sing the very name of her betrothed, the stench of something awful suddenly clouded their crooning. As Samenda passed through the back alley of an apartment complex, she came to the gross realization that something had died. She twisted her head to the sight of a limp body strewn across the remains of a series of broken appliances. Despite her disgust, she couldn't help but notice the stacks of dollar bills at the foot of the corpse. Her shock propelled her actions, and within a glimpse she was off.   

3:

I wish I could say that I trusted her. Especially after all that we had said to each other. But the truth was that I had uncertainties. The truth was that I had to lie to her. The truth was that, well...I had to take the money because I love her. And It's not that I didn't need it. I live alone, off campus. So in some sense it's a godsend. And it might as well just have been exactly that,  because I didn't know where the fuck this money came from. I didn't know who or why or where or what this money was. But I disregarded all of that. It was difficult to look past what her heart or her eyes had promised me. She had these warm hazel jewels that just fell right into me, like a warm cup of coffee.

I truly could not believe how beautiful she was. Not beautiful in the vein of a butterfly or something dainty. Not precious and frail but rather alarmingly magnificent and resilient like some wild cat. Samenda was brutally gorgeous like how some dangerous thing from nature would be. Even her skin seemed flush and brilliant like exotic fauna, to an almost psychedelic degree, as if it were hovering upon her body like a hologram veil. Every detail of her, particularly at this moment, was expressed to me as if it were hyper real or persistently emergent, as if to be continually rising and exaggerating itself to meet my sight. Ever since our time on her porch, this affliction seemed to grow more severe.

 I mean...I was madly in love with her. It hurt so much to still feel uncertainty towards her. I just couldn't bring myself to believe what she had told me. That her fathers mother had died. That's just too distant and clean of a reason for someone to spring twenty thousand dollars in cash on you. Nonetheless, when she asked me if I could take it, I did.

“I can take this. I love you! Thank you so much! This means the world to me. ”

I didn't question her anymore than I had to. Things were moving so fast between us and I just decided to roll with it. I wanted to learn to trust so badly and just let her in. So I let her in. I let her take me to dinner, and with the luxury we now possessed it all just seemed to glide. The car seemed to glide. Her body seemed to glide, as it pressed against me, weightless. The world was made of air, and we were the breeze. A silver current tucked invisibly into the grand movement of it all, completely unresistant, untamed, and unwilled. We were free-falling into each other without resistance. Some would call that love, as I had felt it to be just moments ago. But what I once felt to be love, felt now more like a dream. Not a dream as in heaven, but a sort of trance, like some uncanny reverie. 

The kind of dream where it feels limitless, but despite that you can't seem to find the strength to seize even a thread of it. Your limbs are fatigued, as if you've never used them. You begin to fear for a threat, because you know there would be nothing you could do to stop it. I began to feel the shadow crawl. I couldn't stop myself from becoming helplessly juxtaposed between infatuated bliss and malignant dread. As we walked hand in hand  from my car to the restaurant, I started to hear the slow awakening of footsteps behind us. For too long did I think my sense of helplessness perpetuated some false enemy. Then suddenly it hit me. I turned in a silent gasp towards Samenda, her face spattered with blood. Although it was not her own, I still thought in that moment that it was she who took the bullet. I fell backwards, away from her or it,  and onto a parked car. Sliding down into a floor of wet leaves, I began to choke, and watched in agony as a small man dressed in black pursued my love. After the pain stops, and death begins, you feel bittersweet and left out, as if you’ve had to leave your childhood friends house early. Except this time I felt that in relation to the trees, the road, my shoes, to life itself.  I thought finally, as I drifted away, about the last poem I wrote for Semanda.

If I were true to you

I am dead

If that is news to you

You are next

But if my love should fall

So gently upon your breast

Then nothing rubs that stain away

Not even that of death